Heading Into Holy Week 2012

In this crazy uncertain world there are many people who face the future with anxiety and worries coupled with a great deal of anger.

In difficult economic times people can lose faith and and it is also a time of increasing inter and intra faith divisions.

Many committed people enter Holy Week this year with a faith that is ever deeply challenged. Some have cut their links with the institutional church, disillusioned and sadly disconnected from the sense of Christian community which previously had sustained them.

Holy Week and the beautiful services of the Triduum that run from Holy Thursday through to Easter Sunday are a special gift to us to take time out of normal routine to spend it with Jesus who longs for us to draw close to enter the mystery of the last few days surrounding His life, death and Resurrection.

It is an experience that will take us across boundaries between ourselves and God to allow us to connect.

Holy Week has much to offer no matter where we find ourselves in our life journey:

to enter suffering, to confront the darkness and pain of rejection and betrayal in and around us, to be judged and convicted and then to face death.

We can't do it on our own and we are not on our own- we are in the presence of a loving God.

Somehow I pray that we all manage to come through it with restored hope and belief in the transforming power of Christ who loves us beyond our imaginings.

Be Still For The Presence of the Lord

Be still, for the presence of the Lord, The Holy One, is here.Come bow before him now, with reverence and fear. In him no sin is found, we stand on holy ground. Be still for the presence of the Lord, The Holy One, is here.

Be still for the glory of the Lord is shining all around. He burns with holy fire, with splendour he is crowned. How awesome is the sight, our radiant King of light! Be still for the glory of the Lord is shining all around

Be still for the power of the Lord is moving in this place. He comes to cleanse and heal, to minister his grace. No work too hard for him, in faith, receive from him. Be still for the power of the Lord is moving in this place.

Holy Week is a time when I realise in a very deep
and personal way that Christ can destroy the boundaries that mankind sets
up to separate us from God.

Christ was the Son of God who died for all of us to show that we do not need to scapegoat anyone because there are no boundaries between God and us.

The opportunity to encounter God is an invitation made possible to any person and it is infused with a power to profoundly change our lives for all time.

The Summons

The poetry of R.S. Thomas often begins at a place where mankind's search for meaning questions itself from a place of disengagement from any sense or need of God.

He describes a society that increasingly discards the conventions of traditional practice and where it is apparent that the message of the Gospel is not getting through or connecting to people.

In the process mankind seems to be wasting away in desolation.

But Thomas turns the situation around and expresses the hope of Christianity through the message of the Gospels.

The suffering of Christ is difficult to understand but seems to offer an answer for
all our waywardness and the enduring belief in His Resurrection and our own is one I share.

The Wordfrom Mass For Hard Times R.S Thomas 1992.

Enough that we are on our way;never ask of us where.Some of us run, some loiter,some of us turn asideto erect the Calvarythat is our signpost, armspointing in opposite directionsto bring us in the endto the same place, so impossibleis it to escape love. Imperishablescarecrow, recipient of our cast-offs,shame us until what is a swearwordonly becomes at lastthe Word that was in the beginning.

The last line of this poem portrays well the familiar tortuous struggle mankind increasingly has with God.

Through centuries of breathtaking scientific progress, the more advanced a society is the more it seeks to shed belief in God.

Paradoxically, the more we own or have, the more difficulty we seem to have in seeing and encountering the divine.

The danger in our world is that the Word of God will be shut out.

But the poem shows the ever present committed "scarecrow God ", who takes on all our cast off beliefs that we throw away and resolutely absorbs all the hatred that we throw until we recover our sense of connection.

We are in a continuous process of being reconciled with God.and hope that these words of Christ "I shall draw all "men "to Myself," will be fulfilled.

Who to believe?
The linnet sings bell-like,
a tinkling music. It says life
is contained here; is a jewel
in a shell casket, lying
among down. There is another
voice, far out in space
whose persuasiveness is the distance
from which it speaks. Divided
mind, the message is always
in two parts. Must it be
on a cross it is made one ?

The linnet offers to the world her
glittering song announcing the impending arrival of new life. This is visible and tangible in the material world, momentarily contained inside her precious shell casket in the nest below her feet.

Her egg ‘jewel’ is set against the
mystery of the word of God, in whom the creative source and unity of all life is contained but this perception appears distant from us in a different world.

Thomas sets the two worlds apart and then fuses them together in a perennial question: “Divided mind, the message is always in two parts. Must it be on a
cross it is made one?”

The voice of God leads us to a new life that Jesus invites all of us to share in.

Benedictus from R.S. Thomas

Blessed be the starved womb
and the replete womb.

Blessed the slug in the dew
and the butterfly among the ash-cans.

Blessed the mind that brings forth good and bad
and the hand that exonerates it.

Blessed be the adder among its jewels
and the child ignorant of how love must pay.

Blessed the hare who, in a round
world, keeps the tortoise in sight.

Blessed the cross warning: No through road,
and that other Cross with its arms out pointing both ways.

Blessed the woman who is amused
at Adam feeling for his lost rib.

Blessed the clock with its hands over its face
pretending it is midday, when it is midnight.

Blessed be the far side of the Cross and the back
of the mirror, that they are concealed from us.

They set up their decoy
in the Hebrew sunlight. What
for? Did they expect
death to come sooner
to disprove his claim
to be God’s son? Who
can shoot down God?
Darkness arrived at
midday, the shadow
of whose wing? The blood
ticked from the cross, but it was not
their time it kept. It was no
time at all, but the accompaniment
to a face staring,
as over twenty centuries
it has stared, from unfathomable
darkness into unfathomable light.

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“History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetime,The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.So hope for a great sea changeOn the far side of revengeBelieve in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be:"I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame:"The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet:"My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

On authority"At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

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Dynamite !!

“You Christians have in your keeping a document with enough dynamite in it to blow the whole of civilization to bits...” Mahatma Gandhi

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."-- Basil C. Hume

Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternityIan Bradley The Celtic Way

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Favourite Quotes from Pope Francis

“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”﻿

-- Pope Francis

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Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

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Did the Woman Say ?

Did the Woman Say?

Did the woman say,When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Did the woman say,When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Well that she said it to him then,For dry old men,brocaded robes belying barrennessOrdain that she not say it for him now.

~Frances Croake Frank

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Great Quotes

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. Butyou can reach out to them, and all day long.The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And""You can get all A's and still flunk life." "Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?" -Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

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